Belle & Sebastian

The whimsical Glasgow indie rockers have always liked their festivals to be a bit different. In 1999, the band had just won the best British newcomer award at the Brits, the U.K.’s answer to the Grammys, when they organized the Bowlie Weekender, an ahead-of-its-time antidote to the mud and crowds of most British festivals, in seaside Sussex. Two decades on, they’re at it again—this time with the Boaty Weekender, a four-night cruise in August, from Barcelona to Sardinia, on the 2,394-passenger Norwegian Pearl, which has also hosted the likes of Kiss, Kesha, and the Shiprocked festival. For this one, Mogwai, Yo La Tengo, and fellow Glaswegians Teenage Fanclub will also take to the ship’s five stages as part of a lineup heavy on left field indie. Besides the music, and the Pearl’s bowling alley and outré Bliss nightclub, there’ll be themed balls, Scrabble tournaments, and yoga classes led by Frances McKee, of Glaswegian alt-rockers the Vaselines. No rain boots or camping tents required.

Kurt Iswarienko/Trunk Archive

Oprah Winfrey

She might be considered the godmother of many things: talk shows, self-help, female empowerment—the list goes on. And now one of the nation’s richest self-made women, once dubbed the queen of all media, is the official godmother of a cruise ship, Holland America’s 2,650-passenger Nieuw Statendam. When she launched the ship with a one-off Girls Getaway cruise to the Caribbean earlier this year, it sold out in minutes, barely longer than the standing ovation after her rousing speech at last year’s Golden Globes. Now guests get a series of programs inspired by O, The Oprah Magazine, from meaningful meditation and energizing movement sessions by the pool to O-approved transformational videos and an Oprah Reading Room, a nod to her wildly influential book club. Winfrey has been working with Holland America for a few years, curating a series of Adventure of Your Life voyages, most recently a trip to Alaska with experts including “wisdom teacher” Shefali Tsabary and sound-bathing therapist Sara Auster. Cruising, like politics, television, and social media, has entered Oprah’s orbit.

Jim Wright/Trunk Archive

Jon Bon Jovi

When it comes to entertainment at sea, oceangoers may be more familiar with a certain type of tuxedo-clad crooner inspired by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. But if any cruise line was going to invite the stadium-filling New Jersey–born singer behind Slippery When Wet on board, it was Norwegian. The line has graffiti-style murals, rock-climbing walls, and no dress codes on its ships, preferring to encourage informal, freestyle gatherings. The Bon Jovi frontman will be headlining the Runaway to Paradise voyage, from Barcelona to Palma, Mallorca, on the Norwegian Pearl in August, performing a full-blown concert backed by an 11-piece band on the pool deck. There’s also an acoustic set, during which he’ll take questions from the audience, accompanied by longtime tour photographer David Bergman and producer Obie O’Brien. As for his dress code, that’s easy: The singer has worn the same Reebok Allen Iverson sneakers onstage for the past 15 years.

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Adam D. Tihany

What does it take to design the interior of a cruise ship? The ability to handle bewilderingly large areas, certainly, and match flag-flyingly bold statements with quiet composed personal spaces. Enter Tihany, who fuses Italian finesse with Vegas-style showmanship, making his name with projects such as the Beverly Hills Hotel and restaurants for Wolfgang Puck and Daniel Boulud. But the ocean brought fresh challenges. For example, how to prevent engine vibration from rattling the wine bottles? The answer: Mount the racks on gyroscopes. With plush modern looks for Seabourn’s Encore and Ovation under his belt, Tihany now has the line’s expedition fleet in his sights, as well as a more contemporary ship for Cunard, launching in 2022. But first down the slipway, in November, is Costa Cruises’ graceful Costa Smeralda, which will have a museum devoted to Italian style.

Richard Grassie/Chilli Media

David Linley

The first item of furniture that Linley ever made, at age 14, was a desk crafted out of a single piece of plywood, which he keeps in his 19th-century hunting lodge in Provence. Since then he’s used his talents to furnish suites at Claridge’s and create bespoke designs such as the Torque dining table, unveiled at Masterpiece London art fair last year, its swirling veneers inspired by the Guggenheim museum in New York. But the largest work his studio has made can be viewed on board Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth, on the wall of the Art Deco–style grand lobby. Formed from nine different types of wood, including walnut, sycamore, and maple, the 18-foot-high panel depicts the bow of the first Elizabeth, launched in 1938 by his grandmother the British Queen Mother (the two were close and regularly attended church together). That ship was set on fire by arsonists in Hong Kong in 1972—though not before making a guest appearance in 007’s The Man With the Golden Gun—but its successor continues to evoke the golden age of cruising. Linley’s incredible piece of marquetry is a neat fit for this grande dame.

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Luke Nguyen

When the Vietnamese-Australian chef took his namesake culinary TV series to France in 2014, his riffing with a Parisian butcher led to the invention of Vietnamese steak tartare, with a handful of cilantro leaves, Vietnamese mint, and bird’s-eye chile. Having learned to cook pho at his parents’ hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Sydney at the age of 10, he now owns Vietnamese Red Lantern in Surry Hills and Fat Noodle in Brisbane, and was a judge on MasterChef Vietnam. He’s also the ambassador of river cruise company APT and host of its annual foodie voyage along the Mekong. Now in its eighth year, the next one sets sail in November from Ho Chi Minh, where highlights include a walking tour of the old quarter; a class at Grain, the cooking studio he cofounded; and a degustation at his new restaurant, Vietnam House. This year, for the first time, Nguyen also hops aboard the company’s Grand Bordeaux tour, which serves lunch at Alaine Ducasse’s Ore in Versailles as the aperitif, before sailing from Bordeaux along the Dordogne River to Saint-Émilion for a decadent meal at La Terrasse Rouge in the prestigious Château La Dominique. New dishes, such as his lychee-and-lemongrass bavarois, will no doubt be invented for seafaring foodies who take their baguettes with pickled daikon.

Adrian Gaut/Trunk Archive

Roman and Williams

Husband-and-wife team Stephen Alesch and Robin Standefer spent a decade designing Hollywood film sets together before Ben Stiller tapped them to renovate his Spanish-style L.A. home after working with the couple on Zoolander and Duplex. A flood of power clients followed—Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson, and a set of haute-hipster hotels including Ace Hotel New York, the Standard High Line, and Freehand Los Angeles. Now the duo is taking on cruise ships—specifically Virgin Voyages’Scarlet Lady, due to launch next year. The company’s first foray onto the high seas bills itself as a “24/7 festival at sea,” with banjo drag shows, a tattoo parlor, and a vinyl store. The pair will oversee a Mad Men–style steakhouse, a cocktail-and-cabana joint, and a theatrical nightclub inspired by 1970s discos. Expect them to be really, really ridiculously good-looking.

Manuel Braun/Camera Press

Patricia Urquiola

Over the past two decades, the prolific Spanish-born designer and architect has quietly become one of the most successful names in her field. Her ergonomic creations are playful yet have real substance, often experimenting with color and contours. You may have tip-toed across her geometric ceramic tiles, dropped into the Scandi-inspired Lilo Lounge chairs she made for Moroso, or admired her floaty, snow-white cutouts at Mandarin Oriental Barcelona. Urquiola’s Fjord armchair is part of the permanent collection at MoMA, and the hotel Il Sereno, whose interiors she designed, was the most anticipated opening on the shores of Lake Como in years. So it was a coup when Celebrity Cruises persuaded her to add her name to the design roll call for its pioneering Celebrity Edge ship. The line has always had fun with its cruises, going the extra mile in the way its staff interact with passengers and deftly upscaling the small-boat experience. The billion-dollar Edge is a game changer that aims to disrupt dusty preconceptions about cruising—there are immersive theater shows, botanical-inspired cocktails, a drone obstacle course, and the open-air Magic Carpet platform, which scoots up and down decks outside the hull. As for Urquiola’s contributions, well, she has given Mediterranean restaurant Cyprus a hot-summer ambience and planted a towering installation of foliage above the bar at Eden, a hybrid space that mutates from daytime hangout to nocturnal performance venue. It’s everything you never thought you’d see on a cruise ship. And that is exactly the point.

Karolina Kuras

Erina Takahashi

Her muscular feet have leapt from the boards of many a British arts institution, from the Royal Albert Hall as Aurora in The Sleeping Beauty to Glastonbury Festival’s Pyramid Stage in Akram Khan’s World War I elegy, Dust. As lead principal of the English National Ballet, the Japanese-born dancer embodies the chameleonic spirit of today’s not-only-classical ballerina: In 2007, she danced the lead in Swan Lake at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. In 2015, she performed a duet to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” for the song’s 40th anniversary. This August, Takahashi returns to Southampton to spring from the boards of another national treasure, the Royal Court Theatre of Cunard’s Queen Mary 2, in whose stately ballrooms British naval etiquette and white-gloved service are still cordially preserved. Over a seven-night crossing to New York, the liner will become a floating dance company, where the corps de ballet will perform Tchaikovsky’s work somewhere on the North Atlantic, along with Adolphe Adam’s Le Corsaire and Khan’s Dust. The program includes talks by names such as Merritt Moore, a prima ballerina and quantum physicist, and daily access to classes and rehearsals. This is the ultimate high-arts experience on water.

Steve McCurry

The American photographer’s first experience of war was the Soviet-Afghan conflict in 1980, during which he smuggled film sewn into his coat across the Afghan border. Five years later, his picture Afghan Girl, of the refugee with the piercing green eyes, made the cover of National Geographic magazine and propelled McCurry to fame. But while he made his name with haunting images of humanitarian crises, McCurry is also a prodigious travel photographer, who’s still on the road 10 months a year and has produced books on Afghanistan, India, and coffee growers across the world. Since 2017, he has joined forces with boutique cruise company Silversea, going on 23 adventurous trips (and counting) to shoot images that have already become iconic, from masked tribal performers in Papua New Guinea to a fruit seller in Quito, Ecuador, with a deep stare not unlike that of the Afghan girl. With Silversea, his goal is to show how Svalbard icebergs, the Galápagos Islands, and real cultural immersion can be experienced on ships known for their ultrapersonalized service. For McCurry, the aim is largely what it always has been: finding “the unguarded moment, while wandering and exploring the world.”

Mark Mahaney/Redux

Thomas Keller

The only American chef to scoop three-star Michelin ratings for two restaurants at once—the French Laundry and Per Se—wants to be clear: “We’re not a ship restaurant, we’re a restaurant on a ship,” Keller says about the Grill by Thomas Keller, which opened on the Seabourn Quest in 2016. This outlook fits neatly into Seabourn’s five-strong fleet. Keller’s chefs remain on board, arriving tableside to carve roast chicken with thyme jus and deftly toss Caesar salads, and ensuring the same level of perfection as at his addresses on dry land—the latest of which, TAK Room in New York’s Hudson Yards, is his first in NYC in 15 years. Keller helped define the American destination restaurant for generations of foodies—only now those destinations keep changing.

Art Streiber/AUGUST

Andrew Weil

When Seabourn needed someone to help develop a fleet-wide mindful-living program, it settled on a man whose undergrad thesis was on the narcotic properties of nutmeg. The Santa-bearded Weil is a medical visionary who takes a multi-pronged approach to healing, embracing anti-inflammatory foods, healthy aging, and spontaneous happiness—all inspired by extensive research. He can usually be found in Tucson, at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, which he founded, but in November he will lead a wellness voyage from Athens to Dubai on the Seabourn Ovation, followed by one around the South Pacific in 2020 (on the Seabourn Encore). Together with a handful of professors and expert physicians, he will host workshops, shore excursions (in the past these have included hikes to blow away the cobwebs), and discussions on traditional energy-healing paradigms and how mind and spirit affect our quality of health. A steadying, grounding experience, despite being on the water.

Michael Todd

Alison Levine

There are many life lessons to be found at sea, where the caprices of water, wind, and sky lay out the daily terms. The elemental battle for survival that sailors once faced has been recounted in centuries of seafaring stories, but Levine’s life, dramatically relayed in an inspirational talk given this December on Seabourn Sojourn’sCaribbean cruise, is a modern tale of resilience in the face of adversity. The diminutive polar explorer, sportswoman, and mountaineer, who was once the deputy finance director of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign to be California governor, was born in Phoenix in 1966 with a heart defect that meant she could barely walk up the stairs to her bedroom. It took three surgeries to correct it—during which time she vowed to climb. By her early 30s she was working at Goldman Sachs on Wall Street and had already reached the highest peaks on six continents, Mount Kilimanjaro included. In 2002, she led the first team of American women to climb Everest. They were within 200 feet of the summit before deteriorating conditions forced them to descend—but eight years later she succeeded. By then Levine had joined the ranks of those who have completed the Adventure Grand Slam, having summited seven of the world’s most challenging peaks and skied to both poles. As a leadership mentor and gifted storyteller with a life to rival explorers of old, Levine’s motivational lecture is the most raw and uplifting lesson to be found on December’s smooth Caribbean seas.

Sebastian Boettcher

Nobu Matsuhisa

When Crystal brought the empire-building sushi king—the man who gave us a taste for black cod with miso—on board in 2003, it was the first time a Michelin-level chef had collaborated with a cruise line. It was a move almost as clever as the one Robert De Niro made when he persuaded him to open Nobu New York in the ’90s. Since debuting his Silk Road restaurant on Crystal Symphony 16 years ago, the chef has launched another, on sister ship Serenity, sealing Crystal’s reputation as one of the foodiest cruises around. Ingredients are kept super fresh and local—Nobu’s network of restaurants around the world ensures prime tuna and scallops can be brought on board whenever the ships dock in, say, Hong Kong or L.A. And he still sails himself, making sure his lobster with yuzu sauce is just so and creating omakase dinners for unsuspecting passengers. Nobu upped the game for cruise menus, paving the way for Thomas Keller’s collaboration with Seabourn and, most recently, Daniel Boulud’s with Celebrity. Madonna once remarked that you can tell a city is going to be fun “if Nobu has a restaurant in it.” The same goes for ships.

Dham Srifuengfung/For the S/S19 issue of Another Man magazine

Lawrence Blair

For more than 40 years, this English-born, Bali-based anthropologist and explorer has been participating and leading marine expeditions throughout the Indonesian archipelago. The second time he visited, back in 1972, was with his now late brother Lorne and some funding from Ringo Starr. Their mission? To make a documentary series—the groundbreaking Ring of Fire—that included encounters with cannibal headhunters and the funeral ceremony for the last king of the Toraja people, who believe their ancestors were descended from the stars. These days much of his time is split between hosting private yacht charters (he once did a submersible dive in Raja Ampat Islands with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins) and lecturing on National Geographic and Silversea cruises. But this fall Blair will be aboard the eight-cabin Kudanil Explorer—an experienced expedition ship whose crew know exactly where the best surf spots are—as it sails to the Banda Islands, his all-time favorite castaway destination.